Do we have a conflict here? Potentially a big one yes. An interesting article written by Ashley Morgan over at Upstart Blogger reveals some interesting tactics that Premium Wordpress Theme providers are doing. The issue is over themes that have been created open source, that have been manipulated and turned into a proprietary product. Let me quote an important piece of the article so that you can fully understand the issue here…

 

Enter the premium Wordpress theme. An ingenious way for certain Wordpress designers to make money, sometimes lots of money, from selling Wordpress themes to anyone willing to pay. Those who decided to fork out the cash are rewarded with a Wordpress theme that is very often not much different to the thousands of high quality Wordpress themes, often referred to as free premium themes. In addition to this the customer sometimes gets support from the theme author.

These premium themes come with a sting in the tail. A license is added that attempts to prevent anyone from modifying the code in order to release it freely to the community, putting a thin, and almost certainly unenforceable, legal road block in the way of future development.

Any attempt to develop the code contained in a premium Wordpress theme with a view to releasing it into the community is branded as plagiarism by the person who sold the theme.

But what if that premium theme already contained code that had been developed from another theme, or many themes, as is extremely likely given the organic nature of Wordpress theme development?

Very interesting issue.  My opinion would be that if the theme is created completely from scratch by the designer/developer, than it would be okay to make proprietary. But no way is it okay if the premium theme is piggy backing off an open source theme created at the hands of someone else’s time and energy to promote open source. If that is happening, than it needs to stop and we all need to report these type of issues.  Does anyone know of a particular case where this is happening? I have not inspected this thouroughly enough, but am interested to know if any of you have found anything.